deathboat

By: JOHNSON CUMMINS

Friday night, things speed up accordingly when Montreal’s latest hype band Death Boat try to figure out how to fit all nine members on the postage-stamp-sized stage at l’Escogriffe. Death Boat maintain that they are all landlocked, scurvy-ridden pirates, and sing about the glories of the open sea. All hype aside, one thing is for certain, Death Boat are currently the drunkest band in Montreal, especially since the recently defunct Royal Mountain Band have laid down the crown.

- THE MONTREAL MIRROR

Death Boat

Some friends of our Montreal office are in a nine-piece thrash metal band called Death Boat and they’re playing their first show in Montreal on Saturday May 12th at Petit Campus. They’ve got silly names, shitty costumes, two drummers, and baroque metal tracks with titles like Dungeons and Drag Queens and Lesbian Tsunami that tell the tale of how the Death Boat came to be. Okay, so it sounds kinda gay, but the music is so epic that it actually made us want to run through the streets defiantly punching the air for the whole afternoon.

Their live show is also insane—imagine Pirates of Penzance if Gilbert and Sullivan smoked meth, shopped at the Dollarstore for all their props and costumes, and hired Manowar as their musical accompaniment.

Even if you are lame and hate metal, watching these guys trip all over themselves while laying down flaming guitar licks and singing “Double team, it's the punchline/Cut me in, my bone's ready for sex-time/I dock the boat right on the beach/The Captain's first we get one time each.” is pretty spectaular.

VICE: What goes into putting a Death Boat song together?

Slappy: A lot of alcohol, that’s our lyric juice.

Moppy: Lyric juice, drugs, you know, trips to the clinics uhhhh…. Cables, like you got a lot of cables. Some are long, some are short.

Slappy: Some are like, shorter than the long ones, but a little longer than short ones. There's other ones that are even longer than the long ones, and some that are like, shorter than the ones between the short and the long ones. We plug them into guitars and other speakers and we make a song.

VICE: What are you talking about?

Moppy: Our cables, man. There are some short ones that we put into other things and sounds come out of em. Some sounds we like, but other ones we don’t. The ones we like, we keep em but the ones we don’t like, we just don’t use em.

VICE: Oookaaayye, what should we expect from the show?

Slappy: We put as much effort into making it over the top as possible. We hope people are blown away... There’s going to be a lot of stage props. A purple curtain. Two drum kits.

VICE: What’s up with your lyrics, they’re pretty gross.

Slappy: We do get extremely drunk when we write the lyrics; we try to find the funniest lines. Some fans love us for our lyrics—they take it really seriously. Those people are deranged. We try to follow the Death Boat story as much as possible. If you listen to the songs in order, they tell the story. We are not that good at reading or writing and stuff and we were trying to write a song and someone said, “ass-mom”. We were looking for words that rhyme with it.

VICE: What rhymes with “ass mom”?

Slappy: That one took us awhile to come up with. What did we end up with?

Moppy: I think it was car bomb.

VICE: How would you describe the dynamic of the crew?

Slappy: There’s like two different boats. We got some friends on our boat. There’s Slappy and me, there’s Balls McGee and The Admiral, Skullfucker, he’s on our boat now. And the Old School Lady, she’s a little clingy. The other boat has like BoneFace, he’s a jerk, and like, Skippy, he’s kinda weird.

Moppy: He’s a sexual predator. He’s fucked up dude.

Slappy: You’ve also got Crappy von Shit Pants. He’s the baby.
Some of us get along with each other and some of us don’t get along so good and we fight all the time. Mostly Captain Boneface, he’s a fucking asshole. He makes us do shit that I don’t really like that much.

VICE: Like what?

Slappy: Once he made me do his laundry and I cleaned his pants and it was full of semen and feces and other stuff.
This other time I was about to make it with this hot chick and he did it to her first and then I did it with her and I got gonorrhea. So that kinda sucked…

Moppy: Hey, do you have two Dollars I can borrow?

VICE: No…I don’t. This is a phone interview.

Moppy: Oh…well can I borrow two dollars anyway? Or two-fifty? I will pay you back, I’m just, like, gonna borrow it.

VICE: Um, no. - THE CONCORDIAN

Nautical knavery


>> Are Montreal metalheads Death Boat
pulling our wooden legs?




JOLLY, ROGERED: Death Boat
By JOHNSON CUMMINS

I’m sitting in an infamous watering hole on the Main with Death Boat’s guitarists and singers, Moppy McMoperson and Captain Boneface. The regular barflies fix their 1,000-yard stares in the direction of our table and rub their eyes, not sure if these two pirates are flesh and blood or just an alcohol-induced hallucination.

To be honest, I’m kind of wondering the same thing myself. McMoperson is wearing what seems like a children’s Halloween pirate costume, complete with a moth-eaten stuffed bird perched on his shoulder. Boneface’s outfit proves even worse, with peeling electrical tape affixed to his chompers giving the appearance of a scurvy-ridden mouth and the buttons on his ill-fitting British Navy jacket threatening to pop off with so much as a sneeze.

Not to poke any more holes in these buccaneers’ leaky vessel, or to shiver anybody’s timbers, but if I were to trust my acute investigative instincts, I would venture to say that Death Boat aren’t real pirates at all. Hell, they don’t even have a missing appendage between the two of them.

“I can’t believe some land-lubbers and scallywags would have the cannon balls t’insinuate we be pirate poseurs,” says McMoperson in an effete, high-pitched voice. “The life o’ a pirate runs through me veins, with the high sea being my maiden. If you love barrels of rum, boiled beef and sodomy, being a pirate is the only life to have. We’re the original gangstas and the original punks—you just don’t get any more outlaw than being a pirate.”

Alright, the jury may be out over whether Death Boat are the real deal or not, but one thing is for sure, pirates are definitely the new wolves in this city. When I bring up the fact that concert and DJ night promoters the Pirates of the Lachine Canal have been ruling the St-Laurent River for a while now, the two swashbucklers become livid. “If those butt pirates of the Lachine anal be reading this,” grunts Boneface, “I would just like them t’ know that if they come anywhar near the Death Boat, me will personally bust a hail of cannon balls at their leaky tub and take their booty—and I’m not talking about gold coins either, yaarrgghh.”

Even with their loose lips sinking punk rock ships, and terrible double entendres galore, Death Boat hardly need them to prove their sea salt. Their soon to be released concept record The Trilogy of the Mystic Stone is full of squealing, ’80s-style metal that hoists the Jolly Roger high with guitar shredding and ridiculous falsetto vocals that could cut glass. Just check out some of their leaden sea shanties, like “Lesbian Tsunami,” “Shit Storm” and “Dial B for Balls.”

“Aaargh, the record mightily is our story of the trials and tribulations we have gone through living on the seven seas,” observes Boneface. “We talk about the loneliness at sea, the bloody battles, homoeroticism, mutiny and other staples that seem t’ go well with cheesy heavy metal riffs. Aye, it is not the greatest tale e’er told nor the worst, but I can say it is most definitely a tale.” And with that, Death Boat may finally be telling the truth

With Trigger Effect and Take My Money
at Foufounes Électriques on
Wednesday, Feb. 20, 9 p.m., $8

- THE MIRROR

Indy music braves uncharted waters
The Gazette
Published: Saturday, June 14 2008
If I invented a genre of music, it would contain Hammond organ solos, Necronomicon-inspired lyrics, and the drums would be played by a tank. And it seems Montreal's fertile independent music scene would be the perfect place to do it.
Montreal musician Courtney Wing's latest project can be described as the creation of an entirely new genre. He calls it "symphonic choral folk," and it's a combination of stripped down, soulful folk music with a 10-member, classically trained choir.
The project was inspired by a CBC radio invitation to take part in Live at Breakglass Studios, a new series of intimate performances recorded for broadcast. With two previous albums and a third on the way, Wing took the opportunity to "stretch out from the whole folk-rock world."
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So he added elements to his music, namely McGill-trained opera group Liederwolfe, two percussionists, a double bassist, a violinist and a keyboardist.
"I just like the idea of trying to spice things up and really add unique elements," said Wing, 28, who wrote and arranged the choral parts on computer.
And according to Wing, a B.C. native, there's no better place to create something new than Montreal.
"It really is great here. Artistically, there's so much to influence. Everyone has their sort of unique freakishness to them."
Before the May 30 CBC recording, Wing premiered the genre at La Sala Rosa in front of a packed house, including representatives from the Montreal Chamber Music Festival. Wing also plans to take the project to Toronto's NXNE festival and Memphis's North American Folk Alliance Conference, and hopes to continue with his experiment, inspired by "the idea of being unique, and trying to be innovative."
The above adjectives could also be used to describe Death Boat, another genre-bending Montreal band. You'd also have to use the word "pirate," and a few unprintable scatological terms in order to explain this fusion of metal and theatrical excess.
The group performs in seafaring costumes using numerous props, like inflatable sharks, a boat's bow and the odd noose. "We're a band of sonical deviants," says guitarist/vocalist 'Moppy McMoperson,' staying in character. "We're based on two different boats ... and play music together to tell tales of our sea adventures."
The band has four guitar players, two drummers, two bassists, and a keyboardist, all of whom have characters.
Each Death Boat show, performed at such venues as Foufounes Électriques, promises raucous, high-seas adventure and multiple vocalists shrieking like a furiously buzzing hive of tiny Rob Halfords.
The mix of ferocious punk/ metal and weirdly incongruous pirate fantasy is certainly unique, and about to spawn a concept album. Entitled Trilogy of the Mystic Stone, the record recounts Death Boat's "quest to defeat Captain Boneface" who, paradoxically, is also in the band.
Symphonic choral folk it isn't, but Montreal's innovative independent music scene thankfully has room for both. And maybe even a drumming tank.
Courtney Wing and Liederwolfe will be performing June 27 and 28 at Théâtre Ste. Catherine (264 Ste. Catherine St. E., 514-284-3939). Tickets are $10, and doors open at 9 p.m. For more on Wing (including CBC broadcast dates when announced), visit www.courtneywing.com
Death Boat performs June 22 at Parc Jean Drapeau's Heavy MTL festival. For more information, visit www.myspace.com/deathboat666
Al Kratina


© The Gazette (Montreal) 2008 - THE GAZETTE